Gillard 71, Rudd 31

Phillip Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald reportedly reports that Julia Gillard’s winning margin over Kevin Rudd in this morning’s Labor leadership vote has been 73-29, coming in at the higher end of market expectations.

UPDATE: The official announcement has actually been that the margin was 71-31. Headline amended. Apologies that comments are currently off, which has been necessary to manage Crikey’s notoriously shaky bandwidth.

UPDATE 2: Ongoing apologies for the offness of the comments. Essential Research has come in at 56-44, up from 55-45 last week and 54-46 the week before. Labor’s primary vote is down a point to 32 per cent and the Coalition’s is up one to 49 per cent, with the Greens steady on 11 per cent. Further questions have 39 per cent blaming Julia Gillard for Labor’s problems against 18 per cent for Kevin Rudd, 23 per cent for others in the party and 10 per cent for the media. Reactions to the Gonski report are typically social democratic, with 61 per cent preferring more education funding to a return to a budget surplus and 68 per cent supporting the report’s recommendations as described against 13 per cent opposed.

I’m not sure what this is supposed to infer, but it’s worth pointing out that Kevin Rudd has close ties to Andrew Forrest through the establishment of Forrest’s indigenous employment initiative. Perhaps Mundine is involved in that?

Regardless of what people on the ground think, Pearson has managed to convince those higher up of his brilliance. Like John Howard, for instance, who Pearson formed a close relationship with as prime minister. Controversially, Pearson supported the Howard government's Northern Territory Intervention in 2007.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott is also an admirer, having regularly cited Pearson's policies in Cape York as an example for other communities. He's even floated the idea of using Pearson's welfare management scheme as a model for other forms of government benefits.

Abbott has also backed Pearson over his efforts to overturn the Wild Rivers legislation, which restricts development in the Cape. Queensland LNP leader and potential premier-in-waiting Campbell Newman has also raised issues over what Pearson has called the "green foot" crushing the throats of indigenous people.

Possibly because it will be redundant before it takes effect? Note, this was posted in bigpond etc about an hour ago; so hot off the mark from Oz’s (& much of the world’s) major source of pokie machines.

He should only emerge if there are really big, big, big issues where it would be a matter of integrity if he stayed silent.

Unfortunately there IS such an issue lurking ie Assange.

Must have read my mind. Was only thinking last night that Gillard is very lucky Assange isn’t in Australia given the latest leak out of the US that they intend to fit him up with a charge.

That would be something that may get Rudd out very stridently and would be in opposition to Gillard who showed last time she is quite happy to sell off Assange to the Americans for some brownie points aka Hicks.

The opposing position to Gillard of protecting Assange would be hugely popular and also the right thing, and something Rudd showed an interest in last time.

A split in those advocating for pokies reform benefits nobody but the vested interests, as we saw with carbon pricing when the Greens and SenX decided to play politics with the issue rather than work pragmatically.

Assange has a problem…..he probably broke US law. Now, he may have made a name for himself by doing so, but that doesn’t change anything much. Like it or not, the US is going to act to protect its security-related information.

No matter how much sympathy one might have for Assange, it is completely unrealistic to expect the US to show a blind eye to his actions. If they were to do so, they would really be saying to all and sundry, “Look, here is our secret intelligence. Help yourself. We will not raise a finger to stop you accessing or publishing our data.”

This is obviously not something any Government could just let pass. It is worth remembering as well that no-one forced Assange to publish. He chose to do so of his own volition. He can claim no immunity now.

An associate of the Heartland Institute, the thinktank devoted to discrediting climate change, taught a course at a top Canadian university that contained more than 140 false, biased and misleading claims about climate science, an expert audit has found.

Have newspapers that published embarrassing government documents also broken US law?

The NY Times has some practise having published the “Pentagon Papers” .I am sure they would have had a pretty good legal look at the situation before working with Assange on the material and then publishing.

The problem the Greens and others have with Pearson is that he does not conform with their Rousseauian concept of the “Noble Savage”.

He’s eschews welfareism which he rightly believes has reduced aboriginal people to degraded serfs and he champions causes that encourage self determination and the rights of his people to use traditional skills to exploit Australian natural resources.

I think those who expect Rudd to come out with all guns blazing in defence of Assange really need to get a grip. Kevin Rudd has for a long time cultivated close ties with many in the USA establishment. You can argue whether this is a good thing or not but I seriously doubt he is going to put all that at risk by opposing the USA taking action under its laws to (as it sees it) protect the integrity of its security operations.
The only major reservation I had about Rudd for a long time was his close ties to the back rooms of Washington, even though I thought his views on most other things were OK. Of course, after the revelations of the last few weeks, I now have quite a few more reservations!
I am amazed that the left is now trying to claim Rudd as its own – he has never been anything other than a centrist social democrat. In practical policy terms, I think Julia Gillard is considerably to the left of Rudd.

Isn’t it racist to assume that because one Aborigine has a certain viewpoint, therefore another one does to?

It’s also akin to saying all indigenous Australians must vote a certain way, a ridiculous argument when you consider indigenous people have represented different political parties in this country – Labor, Liberal, Democrats, Greens. The was even an Aboriginal independent candidate who stood in my electorate last election.

I’ve tended to scroll past the Mundine bashing as most of it has been highly ignorant and offensive.